Every so often, a project you believed in early, before the findings, before the charts, before the national attention, comes back into your life with a clarity that reminds you why the work mattered in the first place. That happened last week when I received a message from my colleague and friend Dr. Catherine Millett announcing that the research we helped shape during the Revolution U gathering in Philadelphia is now published.

It is rare in academia to trace a direct line from a brainstorming conversation in a conference room to rigorous, field-shifting reports that will influence institutional practice across the country. Most ideas enter the academic bloodstream slowly. They get reshaped, delayed, reconsidered, or folded into larger initiatives. But this time, the line is clean. The idea became the plan. The plan became the structure. And the structure became research that will matter.

At the Revolution U gathering in Philadelphia last year, Marybeth Gasman, myself and other influential scholars sat with Catherine and her team as they laid out the earliest frame of what would become the Pathways to Graduate School series: millions of prospective graduate students, an enormous archive of demographic and behavioral data, and a guiding question that cut directly to the heart of equity in higher education: Who is considering graduate school, and what must institutions understand to serve them more effectively?

It sounds simple until you begin to realize how little the field has interrogated that question with real nuance. We spent hours shaping the early structure of the project, designing sharper questions and intersectional understanding of how identity, opportunity, and aspiration interact. Sitting together in that room, we were wrestling with the difference between big datasets that reproduce old assumptions and big datasets that tell the truth. Seeing the published reports now, years later, that early work feels both deeply affirmed and vitally necessary.

Catherine’s Pathways to Graduate School series analyzes 1.2 million U.S. citizens considering graduate education, making it one of the most comprehensive examinations our field has ever had of the hopes, barriers, and trajectories facing future graduate students. The five reports venture into territory long ignored in national datasets: they explore subgroup differences within Hispanic communities; the implications of Pell eligibility; the relationship between parental education and gender; the distinctive realities shaping Black prospective students; and the intersectional experiences of women across nine racial groups. Each report stands on its own, but the power comes from reading them together. They reveal a map of possibility and constraint that complicates the stories higher education tells about who is “interested,” who is “prepared,” and who is “likely” to succeed.

For those who want to explore the work directly, here are the published reports:

Women prospective graduate students across nine racial groups
Millett, C. M. (2025). Pathways to graduate school: 1. ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/0n2pxr04

Hispanic subgroup and gender differences
Millett, C. M. (2025). Pathways to graduate school: 2. ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/0dr4j239

Parental education and gender
Millett, C. M. (2025). Pathways to graduate school: 3. ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/zdwwc433

Pell Grant eligibility and gender
Millett, C. M. (2025). Pathways to graduate school: 4. ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/8c704s43

Black prospective graduate students and gender
Millett, C. M. (2025). Pathways to graduate school: 5. ETS. https://doi.org/10.64634/5jw0j752

Taken together, these reports do more than trace a pipeline. They illuminate the landscape around it. They identify where inequities emerge long before a student steps into an admissions office. They name who has been supported and who has been invisible. They show the kinds of institutional environments that allow students to imagine themselves beyond the bachelor’s degree and the kinds that shut down that imagination before it starts. For graduate admissions officers, recruiters, faculty, deans, and policymakers, this is foundational data. It tells us who is knocking at the door and what it will take to open it wider.

The implications for educational leadership and equity research are significant. First, the series challenges the simplistic narratives that have dominated discussions of graduate education for decades. We have long been told that interest naturally funnels upward, that the students who persist do so because they are more driven or better prepared. Millett’s work shows a different truth: aspirations are widespread, but opportunity is unevenly distributed.

Second, the data underscores the structural constraints facing first-generation students, Pell recipients, and racially minoritized groups, who often navigate institutional barriers invisible to their peers.

Third, the reports highlight the urgent need for nuanced recruitment, mentoring, and advising strategies that understand the diversity within populations rather than treating demographic groups as monolithic. And finally, the findings remind us that graduate education is not merely a personal ambition—it is a public good shaped by policy decisions, institutional cultures, and historical inequities that continue to influence who feels welcome.

On a personal level, seeing these reports arrive brought a rare sense of satisfaction in academic life. Many of us contribute to efforts that never see the light of day. Our hours in meetings become footnotes in failed grant proposals. Our early conceptual frames get absorbed into later drafts that don’t get published by journals. That is the nature of academic work. But this time was different. I have known Catherine since the 1990s, when I was a master’s student working in Michael Nettles’s lab at the University of Michigan. Even then, she possessed a clarity of thought and a commitment to truth that set her apart. Over the years, I have watched her influence grow, her voice strengthen, and her leadership deepen across the national landscape. Her message in this work is a reminder that the time we invest in shaping research questions, insisting on equity-centered designs, and resisting simplistic narratives truly matters over the decades.

Catherine’s work exemplifies what I often call equity-focused leadership. These are leaders who understand that data is not neutral, that categories can distort reality, and that research has real consequences for the students whose lives exist inside the numbers. They are the leaders who refuse to accept the limitations imposed by our systems and instead push for scholarship that clarifies rather than obscures. In my Uppity Minorities series on Cloaking Inequity and on LinkedIn, I write about individuals who refuse to make themselves small to fit other people’s expectations. Catherine’s work lives in that lineage. She builds research that not only advances the field but broadens who is recognized as capable, aspirational, and worthy of investment.

Graduate education remains one of the most powerful engines of mobility in the United States. It shapes the labor force, the academic professions, and the leadership pipelines across multiple sectors. Understanding who seeks that opportunity, who is discouraged from pursuing it, and what institutions can do to meet students with clarity, support, and justice is work that affects all of us. It shapes not only admissions practices but the future of the academy and the communities universities claim to serve.

I am grateful to have played even a small role in helping this research come to life, and even more grateful that scholars, practitioners, and institutional leaders across the country will now have data capable of informing real change. I hope you will read the reports, reflect on them with your teams, and use them to spark new conversations about what equity in graduate education truly requires.

The students are there. The aspirations are real. Now the question is whether our higher education institutions are ready to meet them.

Please share.

For the Uppity Minority series click here.

---

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a nationally recognized policy scholar, public intellectual, and civil rights advocate. A trusted voice in public policy, he has testified for state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, while also advising presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. His work has been cited by major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on networks from MSNBC and PBS to NPR and DemocracyNow!. He is a recipient of more than 30 honors, including the 2025 NAACP Keeper of the Flame Award, Vasquez Heilig brings both scholarly rigor and grassroots commitment to the fight for equity and justice.